Anti-frAgile: Moving From Process Theory To Practice Execution

Event Detail

Washington, DC

Session Topics

Leadership for Innovation and Resilience

Sanjiv Augustine

Today’s organizations need to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to incremental change as well as sudden disruptions. The key to achieving this business agility lies in enabling self-management and team-based governance. With a new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit traditional management schemes like top down work assignment, the annual review, strict “clock punching” work hours and inflexible vacation policies; and recognize their negative effects on individual morale and team adaptability.

As leaders, it is also time to recognize and own our responsibility in these counter productive techniques and boldly move into the future with radical alternatives. Now, with organizations as diverse as Virgin, LinkedIn, The Motley Fool, and Zappos applying Frederic Laloux’s “Teal” system to revolutionize management, it is time for us to undergo personal transformations and to lead for innovation and resilience.

Join Sanjiv to learn how to create an innovative and resilient organization with a flatter organization structure, work anywhere flexibility, participatory profit sharing, and delegated hiring and firing. Explore the leadership journey needed, with its fears, challenges and tribulations; as well as its joys, triumphs and unassailable business results.

Measuring DevOps Performance To Increase Flow and Reduce Wait-Time

Dennis Ehle

Do you track the flow of business value into your source code repository and all the way thru deployment to end users? Can you precisely measure wait-times at each step in your DevOps valuestream map? Can you quantify the relative risk of each deployment?

Learn how top performing enterprise software DevOps teams extend enterprise agility by adopting new strategies to evaluate and measure the performance, quality, and risk of each software delivery. This talk will provide real world strategies for defining, measuring, visualizing, and maximizing your enterprise’s ability to deliver incremental business value with each software deployment.

Sketch You Can! Demystifying a Powerful Collaboration Technique

Jeremy Kriegel

This meeting is a waste of my time. When was the last time you had that thought? Was it because the conversation wasn’t focused, or people couldn’t agree, or maybe they were in violent agreement, but couldn’t see it? How easily do you think you can get this meeting back on track? In this session, you will learn a skill that you can apply on the spot that will help you focus the conversation and drive to consensus. Everything you need is probably already in the room.

This technique is specifically for conversations around the features, functions, and behaviors of your product. Most people are visual thinkers, so give them something visual to focus on. You can do that by walking up to the whiteboard and drawing out what people are talking about. By visually capturing the conversation in a public way, you will help all participants understand each other and come to consensus faster. But I can’t draw, you say. Neither can I, and I’ve been successfully using this technique for over 15 years. If you can draw a straight-ish line and a box, you have all the drawing skills necessary.

In this engaging workshop, you will learn how to create a basic sketch of an interface using some simple sketching techniques and UX principles as well as practice thinking-on-your-feet that will help you comfortably do this with a group.

I have used this technique to help teams focus the conversation, visualize the requirements they were requesting, quickly experiment with new ideas, and provide detailed input that I can use to design the outcome. Often, the sketch (or a photo of it) acts as the deliverable for simple problems, eliminating the need for more formal wireframes. This technique is accessible to everyone. You don’t need any special software and anyone on the team can use it. Pick up the pen and get on track again.

Accelerating from Opportunities to High Value Solutions with complexity-informed methods

Ray Arell

Innovation programs within companies has fallen trap to a chronic misuse of the word, to the point most programs are shoehorned into traditional project management frameworks that focus more on the word than addressing the need—enabling the inventor, intrapreneur, and entrepreneur. In this talk, Ray Arell will talk about how to create the right environments and methods that allow true innovation to thrive. This will include an overview of complexity-informed methods like Solutions Thinking, establishing networks of innovators via communities of practice, and other key methods/tools that can help accelerating your time to value.

Creating a Team — Sometimes All We Need is a Little Glue

Matt Badgley

Jeff Cook

Have you ever been in the circle during your stand-up and thought to yourself, “Does this guy next to me really give a damn about what we are try to accomplish as a team?” Or, “If I threw in a few ‘meows’ in the middle of my discussion, would anyone even notice? Would they laugh?” Or, the worst one, “Why can’t everyone on this team just get along?”

I think we all have asked these questions from time-to-time — some of the times are with new teams and some of the times we are working with teams that have been together for a long time and they have just become numb to the daily grind. In all cases, these behaviors result in poor motivation, infighting, slow innovation, friction and tension, and in general, just not good places that we want to work.

During this session we will collectively discover some of the causes of these problems and the impact on the individuals, the team, and the organization. Then we’ll explore how questions can help bring teams together and change the vibe of any group situation. You’ll walk away with a great technique to evolve your team from tolerate to collaborate.

Building the Wrong Thing Faster: Two Delivery Successes That Led to Product Failure

Anne Steiner

Anne shares the story of two product development efforts that were wildly successful in terms of delivery but were failures in the market. She’ll discuss the ups and downs of each and how delivery remained king even after market challenges were revealed. Then, through a positive example, she’ll share strategies for avoided this trap by putting product learning ahead of (or at least equal to) delivery.

Cracking the Code... Implementing SCRUM at Scale within Enterprise Data at Fannie Mae

Phillip Manketo

Join two Fannie Mae Senior Managers, Atif Salam, Director of Delivery, Enterprise Data, and Dave McMunn, Director, Agile Program Office, who were directly responsible for the adoption of Agile within Enterprise Data as well as Phillip Manketo, a Senior Agile Consultant, representing Eliassen Group’s Agile Practice, who worked as a day-to-day strategic partner, and part of a larger team of external Agile SMEs, facilitating the implementation.

Within the larger context of the transformation to Enterprise Agility at Fannie Mae, this Experience Report will focus on the changes to the organization, architecture, and technical practices required to implement data attributes every two-weeks and the corresponding benefits realized.”

From MVP to MVB – Quantitative Product Development to Fail Even Faster and to Not Fail at All

Esra Kucukciftci

While agile can get you to minimally viable product and beyond very effectively, you simply can’t iterate your way into profitability and monetization. In this session, we introduce a few analytical techniques and designs of experiments that go beyond A/B testing, for developing the products that you can actually monetize.

Speakers

David Hussman

David teaches and coaches continuous learning with product discovery and product delivery. His style is non-dogmatic and pragmatic. Getting to know a project community allows him to seed self-discovery and product ownership and avoid falling into the expert trap of simply telling people what they “should do”.

Sanjiv Augustine

Sanjiv Augustine is the president of LitheSpeed, an agile consulting, training, and product development company. With 25+ years in the industry, Sanjiv has managed agile projects from five to more than 100 people, trained thousands of agile practitioners through workshops and conference presentations, and coached numerous project teams. As a leading proponent of Agile in the management space, he has served as a trusted advisor to executives and management at leading firms.

Phillip Manketo

Phillip Manketo is Eliassen Group’s Mid-Atlantic Delivery Lead and a Senior Agile Consultant. He is a multi-disciplined Agile practitioner with a proven track record of leveraging Agile practices to consistently deliver exceptional results at scale on behalf of Fortune 500 clients, Start-ups and Federal Government entities.

Paul Culling

With over 20 years of experience in the development and marketing of both packaged and service-based offerings, Paul has significantly contributed to a number of successful high-growth technology and consumer-facing companies.

Esra Kucukciftci

Jeremy Kriegel

Jeremy Kriegel has been designing great user experiences (UX) for almost 20 years. Just as we need to understand the needs and context of users to craft a design solution, Jeremy believes that success also requires us to look at the business context to craft an appropriate design process.

Anne Steiner

A product coach at DevJam, Anne will be talking on Building the Wrong Thing Faster: Two Delivery Successes That Led to Product Failure. She’ll share the story of two product development efforts that were wildly successful in terms of delivery but were failures in the market.

Ray Arell

As a founder of nuCognitive LLC, Ray Arell is one of the company’s principal consultants and coaches. His 30+ year career has been dedicated to building great teams, communities, and products.

Dennis Ehle

Dennis Ehle is a pioneer and thought leader in continuous delivery automation and agile delivery methodologies. Dennis is passionate about helping agile teams dramatically reduce the transaction cost associated with delivering incremental change. Prior to joining VersionOne as VP of DevOps Strategy, Dennis led the creation of ClearCode Labs to help organizations continuously deliver high-quality software releases more frequently by merging proven methodologies with empowering tools and technology.

Jeff Cook

Jeff has been leading teams for nearly two decades with companies such as John Deere, FTD, and Constellation Software. In his various leadership roles, Jeff has used questions to create a binding element within his teams, which has built more authentic relationships. As author of the book, Group Glue, Jeff brings stories and experiences of how these “question experiences” can evolve your team from “tolerate” to “collaborate”. Jeff’s latest adventure is with VersionOne as the Director of Support Services.

Matt Badgley

With a career in Information Technology that has surpassed drinking age, Matt has wore one too many hats in roles from Systems Analyst to Programmer to IT Manager to Programmer to Sr. Director. He likes being creative and learning new things. Matt’s passion has been working with product delivery teams to develop into their own identity and build valuable solutions by making great, innovative software. Matt has been applying Lean / Agile ideas for a long time and leveraging their underlying practices with the right combination of pragmatism and conviction. At the end of the day, Matt believes in integrity, hard work, trial-and-error, people, and faith.